Doubleheader

By Ron Swoboda

May 31, 2013

The first time I played ball against Willie Mays, in 1965, it was impossible to take my eyes off him. At bat, in the outfield and on the bases, he did everything differently from — and better than — anybody else. Mays’s style of play could come only from an impressive intelligence and a thoroughly cultivated knowledge of the game.

Mickey Mantle, by contrast, whom I encountered in spring training in 1966 and ’67, seemed less studied and more instinctual. Baseball appeared easy for the Mick, and he occasionally said as much. Once in spring training I screwed up my courage to ask for some batting tips, but he waved me off: “Kid, I don’t know anything about hitting.” That made two of us.

In “Mickey and Willie,” the veteran sportswriter Allen Barra explores in depth the remarkable similarities between these two great New York center fielders, one white and one black: both from dirt-poor Southern backgrounds, both born in 1931 to athletic fathers in male-­dominated families, both of them prodigies and perennial All-Stars celebrated for their speed and power. They were even about the same size, though Mantle’s upper body was ­bigger.

That’s not all they had in common, either. “I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, in that order, are the two most written-about players in baseball history,” Barra acknowledges. “And yet, it seems to me that there has always been one major element missing from the many books on Mantle or Mays: each other.”

Barra gives credit for this premise to the venerable reporter Charles Einstein, who wrote about Mays in the 1979 book “Willie’s Time.” In what amounts to a diligent compendium of other books and articles, along with a couple of desultory interviews with the principals (conducted decades ago in the case of Mantle, who died in 1995), Barra works hard to construct a cohesive narrative about these two extraordinary players. If he misses the mark here and there, remember that his targets are in motion and the glimpses we have are anecdotal collages at best.

Image

Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays in 1968.CreditPars International

Yet he succeeds in his main objective, getting us to view Mantle and Mays side by side. “I believe they knew each other better than anyone else knew them,” the baseball writer Roger Kahn tells Barra at one point. “They were the only two men in America who understood the experience they had both been through.” In this they resembled Matisse and Picasso, the two greatest artists of the early 20th century, who, like Mays and Mantle, always knew what the other was up to.

Their differences were as instructive as their similarities. Mantle lived a much wilder life, and his exploits sometimes played out in public. Already a heavy drinker when he arrived in New York from the little town of Commerce, Okla., he became notorious for the drunken carousing he engaged in with his running buddies Billy Martin and Whitey Ford. In Mantle’s own telling he once enjoyed oral sex from a “very nice girl” under the bleachers beside the bullpen at Yankee Stadium. This story was making the rounds when I joined the Yanks in 1971, and we believed it. (A door in the home bullpen opened onto the street outside, and some pitchers and I once traded baseballs for a pizza through that door. We thought that was pretty neat.)

Mays, from Westfield, Ala., a small, tightknit community just outside the steel town of Birmingham, kept any dirty laundry private. Cleon Jones, a teammate of mine on the 1969 world champion Mets and still a friend today, played with him on the 1973 league champion Mets. “Mays knew who he was,” Jones told me. “He didn’t go out much, and he didn’t drink. In fact, we were in his room after we clinched in Chicago. There was Champagne around and I talked Willie into having a little and he got high as a witch doctor.” So neither guy could handle alcohol, apparently — but Mays rarely touched it, and Mantle rarely stopped.

Barra’s bibliography may be the most impressive aspect of his book, with what seems every book ever written about sports in New York. In all candor, I’m not a big reader of sports books. I’m more interested in things I don’t have a handle on, like quantum physics. (The only string theory I understand involves the string they stretch from home plate down the left- and right-field lines to help the crew apply lime.) I do try to read good literature — great literature, if I can find it — which Barra’s book never pretends to be. It reads more like sports talk radio and occasionally like a box score, which is fine for this topic. And while I quickly lose interest in statistics, they are important here. When Barra is arguing that Mantle and Mays should have won more Most Valuable Player awards, he wields stats like one of Babe Ruth’s 36-inch, 40-ounce bats, and he’s right. Baseball, more than any of the other major sports, connects intimately with its realm of statistics.

The Hall of Fame numbers that Mantle put up in his 18 big league seasons and Mays did in his 22 speak unequivocally to their greatness. And accumulating those numbers may have been the easiest part of their lives. Even knowing they were largely responsible for their teams’ success was not their heaviest burden. But celebrity, that false idol, puts you in the cross hairs of so many people wanting so much of your time and your being. In the smaller increments that came my way, I tried to see celebrity as a byproduct of what I was lucky to be doing, on the diamond and on television after I became an announcer. I was told that who you were was about how you handled this fame and how you treated other people.

Barra’s fixation with Mays and Mantle, he says, stems from events dating to his childhood in New Jersey. Foremost was a 1961 exhibition game he attended between the Yankees and the San Francisco Giants, where he first saw both players in person. Mays, returning to the city his Giants had departed in 1958, received a thunderous welcome. (San Francisco, by contrast, took a while to warm up to him, prompting one journalist to remark, after Nikita Khrushchev visited in 1959: “What a city. They cheer Khrushchev and boo Willie Mays.”) Mays drove in two decisive runs after Mantle had put the Yankees up early with a towering two-run bomb to right.

If it’s a stretch to believe that from that moment on, baseball for Barra meant only Mays and Mantle, well, at least it makes a tidy point of entry for this book. As with the weary argument over who is the best center fielder of all time, Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle, the truth is sometimes what you want to believe. I’ll leave that one with you and Allen Barra’s well-told story.

MICKEY AND WILLIE

Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age

By Allen Barra

Illustrated. 479 pp. Crown Archetype. $27.

Ron Swoboda played outfield for the New York Mets from 1965 to 1970, and for various other teams before retiring in 1974.